The number of successful cyberattacks per year per company has increased by 46% over the last four years. But what really needs to be considered when exploring a solution? What questions need to be asked? Download to find out...

Google yanks 29 malware-packed photography apps from the Play Store

Open and shutter case

IF FOR SOME REASON the built-in camera on your Android phone isn't making your snaps beautiful enough, there's no shortage of photography apps to help you out. Well, we say there's no shortage: there are now 29 fewer apps than there were a week ago thanks to a Trend Micro investigation that showed some very shady behaviour indeed.

The apps in question used a number of underhand techniques to ruin users' days. Some would push full-screen ads when users unlocked their phones. Others would run try and phish user data while pretending to be competitions, while yet more would get you to upload photos to a website under the pretence of enhancing them, only to steal them instead, presumably to create fake profiles around the web.

Others were packed with adverts that downloaded a paid porn player to the handset. The real kicker? The player was incapable of playing content. It's bad enough paying money for mucky movies at the best of time, but you can at least play them to your heart's content, generally speaking.

The apps tended to have one other thing in common: they made themselves very hard to get rid of. As part of their code, they would also avoid appearing in the Android app list, to make them harder to drag and delete.

That self-preservation might have been unnecessary as the apps did a pretty good job of looking innocent while doing all of this, as Trend Micro Mobile Threats Analyst Lorin Wu wrote in the company's explainer. "None of these apps give any indication that they are the ones behind the ads, thus users might find it difficult to determine where they're coming from."

Google has now kicked all 29 apps from the store, but what is concerning is just how widely installed some of them are. While Cartoon Photo Filter only has "5+ installs", seven are marked as having over 100,000, one has over 500,000 and three have over a million: Pro Camera Beauty, Cartoon Art Photo and Emoji Camera. The latter of these means that The Emoji Movie is no longer the worst thing featuring emoji you can download to your phone, which is quite something.

The full list of banned camera apps, just in case you have any of them installed:

Pro Camera Beauty

1,000,000+

Cartoon Art Photo

1,000,000+

Emoji Camera

1,000,000+

Artistic effect Filter

500,000+

Art Editor

100,000+

Beauty Camera

100,000+

Selfie Camera Pro

100,000+

Horizon Beauty Camera

100,000+

Super Camera

100,000+

Art Effects for Photo

100,000+

Awesome Cartoon Art

100,000+

Art Filter Photo

50,000+

Art Filter Photo Effcts

10,000+

Cartoon Effect

10,000+

Art Effect

10,000+

Photo Editor

5,000+

Wallpapers HD

5,000+

Magic Art Filter Photo Editor

5,000+

Fill Art Photo Editor

1,000+

ArtFlipPhotoEditing

1,000+

Art Filter

1,000+

Cartoon Art Photo

1,000+

Prizma Photo Effect

1,000+

Cartoon Art Photo Filter

100+

Art Filter Photo Editor

100+

Pixture

100+

Art Effect

50+

Photo Art Effect

10+

Cartoon Photo Filter

5+

How did these slip through the increasingly leaky-looking Google Play net? Well in Google's defence, the app developers did a good job of hiding their contents, using multiple layers of compression archives to dodge analysis and tough encryption on the remote servers the apps connected to.

All the same, it's worrying that it took a security company digging in to expose them. If Google isn't on top of apps with over a million installs, then it raises serious questions about how many lesser-installed apps are going to do serious damage to your phone if you give them the chance. µ